Some of you may remember the previous edition of this newsletter, which contained a solemn promise that I would be writing to you “no more than once a month.”
That was six months ago.
I would like to say it’s because I wanted to “save your inboxes,” but that would be a lie. The truth is I didn’t write that much! What’s more, the tidiness of your inbox is of no concern to me. As of this moment, I have 55,602 messages in my own inbox—mostly unread, what of it?—and I couldn’t be happier. I even pay Google to let me do this. Most are from various publicity agencies, and rather than delete them, I just let them fester in the cloud, and occasionally I get a notion along the lines of, Hmm, wonder what’s doing at the Four Seasons in Jimbaran Bay, Bali? And all I have to do is search my emails to discover that, actually, there’s this new nighttime spa offering for couples, who are “invited to slow their thoughts, breathe in the heady scent of frangipanis,” and awaken to “a smoothing salt scrub.”
(And no, this is not sponsored content but good idea.)
Speaking of a salt scrub, I just got through watching The Terror, a miniseries loosely based on the HMS Terror—maybe don’t name your boat this?—and its disappearance in the Arctic while attempting to navigate the Northwest Passage.
Despite The Terror’s astonishing brutality (trigger warning if you have bad associations with the taste of human flesh), or because I’m just in that sort of mood lately, I can say without reservation that this is the best thing I’ve ever seen on TV—at least up until the climactic tenth episode, when the whole schooner drifts a notch off course.
Neither of my two recent stories is nearly as good as The Terror (and neither has much to say about the taste of human flesh), but each one in its way dovetails nicely with the series’ key themes: our violation of the natural order, and the disastrous fatuousness of a contemptuous skipper.
First The Climate Commencement Speech Our College Grads Deserve, is one of my occasional experiments with heartfelt sincerity, an essay about how badly we’ve fucked over the next generation of humans, including my own kids, and those that might follow. Maybe I’m a soft touch, but the climate situation makes me sad. How about you?
The second is the long-marinating memoir of my six months of glory editing the New York Observer and working directly with Jared Kushner, that Kalorama King Joffrey. To be honest, I’d been hoping to peg the story to his indictment, but then old Cap’n Mueller steered the ship of state onto into an ice floe, and here we sit.
Hope you like them. Thanks for reading and by all means, pass it on!